Spiders Can Hear You From Across The Room

It looks like spiders have no sense of sound as have no ears yet they can detect you approaching them.

Spiders have represented the epitome of horror for mankind right from the beginning. Like snakes and bats they arouse primal fears that refuse to go away.

Now, researchers have found that spiders can actually sense you approaching them from across the room. This comes as somewhat of a surprise since they do not have any ears. Yet the hair on their legs are so sensitive that they can detect human speech from several meters away.

This finding debunks the myth that arachnids cannot hear and that they are only motivated by sight and touch. The sense of hearing in spiders is definitely there.

They can detect sounds farther away than was thought of by human beings previously. They do indeed lack eardrums along with any ears, yet they make up for this lack in other ways so that it seems to make no difference.

It is not such a thrilling find to know that spiders can hear you as well. These creepy-crawly creatures are a nightmare for parents as well as children since some of them are poisonous and can deliver quite a bite or two.

The research concentrated on the electrical recordings made from the brains of North American jumping spiders, according to the Guardian. It was quite a task to accomplish since the spiders’ bodies were like pressurized and inflated tires.

As soon as an aperture was made in the outer shell, the spider simply exploded. The original experiment was all about how the spiders processed visual information.

Yet the researchers could not help noticing that the spiders responded with restlessness in their brain signals when furniture was moved about in the room or hands were clapped.

Everybody thought that the spiders could not hear anything. Yet here was evidence to the contrary that they could. Tiny hairs on the spiders’ forelegs were found to be responsible for this hearing sense.

When water droplets were attached to the hairs, the spiders’ brains stopped responding. Spiders are also more sensitive to lower sound frequencies.

Although this so-called auditory sense in spiders could be far less acute than in humans, it nevertheless did exist. Yet it probably felt like a telephone line with a lot of static in the background.

The findings of this research got published in the journal Current Biology.